Mozilla has begun releasing Firefox 85, with the latest release ending support for Adobe Flash in all major web browsers. Apple first discontinued Flash in its Safari browser last September. Google then did the same with Chrome last week, followed a day later by Microsoft's Edge.

The widespread banishment took a long time. Adobe acknowledged in 2017 that open standards like HTML5 and WebGL had matured and Flash was no longer needed. And so began the process of phasing out Flash.

Currently, with Firefox 85, the browser no longer supports Adobe Flash from the start. Additionally, there is no setting to re-enable support.

In addition to banning Flash, Firefox 85 aims to improve privacy by cracking down on so-called supercookies.

"Supercookies can be used in place of regular cookies to store user identifiers, but they are much harder to remove or block. This makes it nearly impossible for users to protect their privacy as they browse the web," Mozilla explained in a blog post.

"Over the years, trackers have been discovered storing user identifiers as supercookies in increasingly obscure parts of the browser, including Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags. The changes we are making in Firefox 85 will significantly reduce the effectiveness of cache-based supercookies by eliminating the ability of trackers to use supercookies across Web sites," Mozilla added.

On the technical side, Firefox 85 accomplishes this by using a different image cache for each website a user visits. So, for example, if the same image is embedded on multiple sites, Firefox will reload the image from the network instead of loading it from the local cache.

There are other caches that can be exploited by trackers to build super cookies.

"To further protect users from connection-based tracking, Firefox 85 also partitions pooled connections, prefetch connections, preconnect connections, speculative connections, and TLS session identifiers," Mozilla states.

Mozilla's own page load tests showed increases of 0.09 to 0.75 percent below the 80th percentile, and up to 1.32 percent at the 85th percentile.

If you already have Firefox installed, you can get the latest updates by clicking on the three horizontal bars in the upper right corner and selecting Help > About Firefox.